Sovereign Tower [REVIEW] – A Brilliant Time-Twisting Tale of Medieval Management

In Sovereign Tower, you start out as a wandering outcast running from a burning village, when – by pure luck – you stumble across an ancient tower and realise you hold the key to get inside. Just like that, you go from being a nobody to the new ruler of a magical kingdom… wild. It is a wonderful setup for a game that mixes visual novel storytelling with a rather tough management sim, with players thrown onto the throne with zero experience and suddenly expected to run the country and fix all of its problems. It is a great concept that’ll hook you straight away, dropping you into a world where every single choice you make actually matters.

Check out some screenshots down below:

The core of the experience revolves around a strict daily schedule that, whilst tough to manage, always feels incredibly satisfying. Your mornings are usually spent holding court, with citizens, nobles, and eccentric foreigners all approaching you with a seemingly endless stream of problems for you to solve. How you respond to each of these problems shapes your ruler’s personal stats and directly influences how the kingdom’s various factions view you – for example, pleasing the wealthy merchants might absolutely enrage the working class, while being a bit too generous could leave your treasury completely empty. You are CONSTANTLY balancing the happiness of your people against the harsh realities of medieval economics, and whilst it sounds like a straightforward conundrum on paper, the emotional pull of the consequences really does make the experience enthralling.

After sorting through the morning drama, your afternoons are dedicated to your most valuable asset: your knights. This is not your standard group of boring, righteous heroes though, with your Round Table including well… just about anyone (there are some wild possibilities but I don’t want to spoil any of that here). When a quest comes in, you need to pick the right person for the job, and this is where things get brilliantly complicated – quests have strict deadlines, meaning you have to dispatch your champions before it is too late, or face disastrous consequences.

“Sovereign Tower is a brilliant time sink that successfully merges the stress of a management sim with a deeply reactive roleplaying game… I loved it.”

Managing these warriors is practically a game in itself, with each featuring tabletop-style stats that you can upgrade as they gain experience. Perhaps more importantly, they possess hidden moral boundaries and preferences – you have to spend your precious time investigating your heroes to uncover these traits, with certain knights being more suitable for specific tasks. And believe me, some won’t be happy with the choices you make, and if you push them too far, they will abandon your service entirely. You are basically managing a team of deeply flawed, heavily armed employees, and the sheer number of branching narrative paths it creates is staggering. I’m trying to be a little cryptic here because I really don’t want to give anything away, especially since the surprises brought with each scenario are some of Sovereign Tower’s best moments… just know that the management aspect of it all is utterly enthralling.

But what happens when you inevitably mess up, because trust me, you will? Well, Sovereign Tower features a massive trick up its sleeve to help you out: a time-travelling demon living in your basement crypt. If things go terribly wrong, you can make a deal to rewind the clock, with the genius part of this being that your character remembers everything from the erased timeline. You can use this future knowledge to unlock totally new dialogue choices, bypass lengthy negotiations, or even stop assassinations before they get a chance to happen, making your time-twisting antics invaluable to your success. However, it is a double-edged sword, because undoing a mistake means you also erase any of the positive alliances or loot you gained in that timeline… it’s a case of weighing up what holds more value to you. It adds a tremendous layer of strategy to the experience and gives the game an immense amount of replayability though, constantly tempting you to search for the perfect outcome… just be warned, you might never find it, but that’s what makes Sovereign Tower so damn good.

Check out some screenshots down below:

As mentioned, I’ve tried to be a little cryptic here, because I don’t want to give too much away about Sovereign Tower – heck, I haven’t even mentioned the romance system, or the fact that it plays a lot like Dispatch (which was one of our favourite games last year). Just trust me: if you like a management-style sim that really does something different, you NEED to play this, and go in as blind as you can. I loved the genuine sense of surprise that each scenario would bring, and when things went well (or even when they went wrong), it always brought a smile to my face.

Developer: Wild Wits Games
Publisher: Curve Games
Platform(s): PC (Reviewed)
Website: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4113940/Sovereign_Tower/